Friday, April 26, 2013

Entry 177: Uh-Oh, the Time Has Come

I knew this day would come.  Had I done the math, I probably could've deduced it was set to come right around now, but I didn't.  It sneaked up on me.  My son is starting to like stupid shit.  S has been playing him stupid baby songs since he was born, but he never expressed that he enjoyed them over any other song.  He couldn't yet clearly demonstrate a preference.  Now he can, and the results are not good.  We always play youtube videos for him while he eats solids to distract him and make it easier to get a spoonful of food in his mouth.  I try to play something I like that I think he might like too, such as the Duck Tales theme song or a Tiny Toons bit set to They Might Be Giants or something like that, but he either gets bored or cranky watching my stuff.  However, S stumbled across this Gummy Bear song that he absolutely loves.  The first time he saw it he laughed harder than I've ever seen him laugh at a video.  Now he watches it absolutely transfixed.



It's great except it's terrible, because the song and video are god-awful.  I'll post it below, but I'll also give you a brief overview in case you aren't a masochist and don't watch it.  It's this little CGIed gummy bear -- apparently named Gummibär (I knew it was foreign-made!) -- who sings in an electronically modulated voice and dances around to techno-y music in orange underpants.  There are also cutaways of him doing various activities like bumpin' his ride, playing the tuba, visiting the Empire State Building, and bouncing on a bouncy ball.  The music is evilly catchy -- I defy anybody to listen to it more than once and not have it stuck in their head the next day -- and the video is weird.  At one point he shakes his gummy ass, but his underpants are on too low so you see a bunch of gummy crack, and then at another point he puts his hand on his gummy crotch.  It's not quite enough to be inappropriate for kids, but still, like I said, it's weird.  Also, one of the lines is "three times you can bite me".  Anthropomorphizing food is always strange to me.  Like the sexy female M & M -- you want to eat something that flirts with you?



Anyway, on to a different topic...

I've said it before, I'll say it again.  I don't like the Tea Party, I don't subscribe to most their principles, but I get why they exist.  If you don't get this, move to D.C. and try to deal with a city agency.  You will go insane trying to navigate a needlessly complex bureaucracy staffed by mostly indifferent or incompetent people.  That is, when you want something from them.  When they want something from you, suddenly they're a paragon of efficiency.

Unfortunately, S and I need two things from the city right now.  The first is a guest parking pass for our nanny, so she can park on our street without getting a ticket.  For the past four months she's been parking in an unzoned area a few blocks away, which she shouldn't have to do, but which she has had to do, because the pass we've requested five times since Christmas hasn't arrived yet.  We've literally requested it five times.  S called three times, and they never sent it.  Then I called a few weeks ago and was assured personally by Bobby at Parking Services that we would have it in 10 days.  Of course it never came (so much for Bobby's word).  S called again yesterday, and they said they would put it in the mail that night.  If they really did this then it should get here by Monday at the latest, so we shall see.  Don't hold your breath.

The most annoying part of it all is that there is really no accountability and no recourse.  We just have to call up and ask again.  They don't even give you a tracking number or send you a confirmation email or anything like that.  And it's not like I can go to a rival parking service.  I suppose I could try to complain to a higher-up or go down there in person or write a letter or something, but those are huge inconveniences.  Getting a pass so that my nanny can park in my neighborhood (a neighborhood with ample street parking, I might add) shouldn't be a political cause.  It should be a nothing task.  I just don't get why this is so hard.



But the parking pass is actually small potatoes.  They main thing we need is to get our social security numbers verified.  For some reason we were flagged by DC, and they won't give us our tax refund until we each get a written letter from the Social Security Administration saying we are who we say we are.  In order to do this we actually have to go an SSA office in person.

So, annoyed, I go to the office in downtown DC on Wednesday.  I wait in line, go up to the desk, tell the man why I'm here, show him my ID, give him my driver's license, he says thank you, and tells me to sit down and wait to be called.   

"What?  Wait to be called?  I just waited in line for ten minutes."
"Yes, now you have to wait to be called."
"But I just need to get verified."
"Yes, so have a seat, please."
"But didn't you just verify me?"
"No, sir.  Have a seat and wait to be called."



I look out over the throngs of people waiting to be called.  It's standing room only... well, standing room or packing-yourself-between-two-women-with-ghetto-booties room only.

"How long is the wait?"
"Don't know.  Could be a half hour or more."       
"I don't even understand why I'm here.  Why do I even need to verify my social security number?"
"To get it verified."
"And you didn't just do this when you took all my information."
"No [annoyed].  You have to wait."

I find the two people with the smallest asses and squeeze my way between them.  This place makes the DMV look like a well-oiled machine.  You don't take a number, there are no screens counting people down, you don't know if you're behind all these other people or if you're waiting in separate queues or what.  You just sit and wait.

I'm there about five minutes when I overhear the woman next to me say she's been there for 35 minutes.  I get up and walk out.

It felt pretty good to just leave, truth be told, but it's not exactly a victory.  I just have to go back another time, and S has to go at some point, as well.  I'm going to try a different strategy though.  Now that I know what a clusterfuck it is, I'm going to go to a different location -- one that isn't in the heart of the city, one that isn't easily accessible by public transportation, at all, and I'll try to go at an off-time.  Oh, and I'll bring a book.  Actually, I won't.  Nobody brings a book anywhere anymore.

OK, until next time...   

Monday, April 22, 2013

Entry 176: Top Men

So they caught and/or killed both suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, but let's get to the more important stuff: Indiana Jones.  This past weekend some cable station ran an Indian Jones marathon, and S and I got caught up watching a little Raiders of the Lost Ark Saturday night.  We came in right about the time Marion gets tossed into the snake pit with Indy, and then we watched the rest of the movie.  S got tired and wanted to bail with a few minutes left, but I made her watch until the end with me.  Actually, I didn't make her, I just told her that a big scene at the end contains a groundbreaking moment in cinema history, but then refused to give any more details.  Needless to say, she was quite disappointed when we actually watched the scene ("stupid" was the word she used, I believe).  Apparently a guy's face melting in a super dated fakey-looking manner only qualifies as "a groundbreaking moment in cinema history" if you first watched it as a prepubescent male in 1982, not a 34-year old female in 2013.  Huh?  Go figure.



Raiders is up there as far as my favorite movies of all-time go.  It's probably my pick for best action / adventure movie ever.  Certainly part of the reason I like it now is that I loved it as a kid, but that's not the entire explanation.  There are plenty of movies I thought were cool as a kid that are virtually unwatchable now.  (Have you ever tried to sit through The Dark Crystal as an adult?)  Raiders just holds up.  The opening scene obviously is a classic, but the scene in Marion's bar in Nepal might be even better.  You're introduced to the sassy, sexy Marion Ravenwood, and the creepiest villain ever, that sniveling, pale-faced Nazi with the bowler hat and the John Lennon glasses.  (A great bit in that scene is when, in the middle of the shootout, Marion takes a quick hit off the leaking whiskey cask, before getting back into the action.) The famous scene at the end with the giant warehouse is also great, although the TV station botched it.  They ran a promo over the main theme song kicking in one last time just before the credits roll -- totally weak.



In watching Raiders for the approximately 35th time, however, I noticed a few shortcomings.  The biggest one is that the plot is pretty uncreative at a macro level.  For instance, Indiana goes through these trials and tribulations to find and excavate the arc before Belloq and the Nazis get it, but then they see him doing it, and they just take it for themselves.  That's how they get the arc.  It's basically just somebody saying, "Hey, look over there!", and then they go over there and take it.  Then, Indy, on nothing more than horseback, regains possession of the arc by infiltrating an armed convoy and hijacking a truck (and by the way, the scene where he's being dragged under the truck is less believable than the scene in which the arc wipes out a brigade of Nazis with magical light beams).  He takes it on a boat, and then Belloq and the Nazis somehow just show up on a u-boat without explanation and take it again.  Also, in the big arc-opening scene, Indy and Marion are able to completely avoid the wrath of the arc spirits just by closing their eyes.  Really?  That's it?  Like I said, lacking a bit in creativity.


[A bit of editing in this clip.  The person who posted it removed the scene between Marion and Indiana I discuss below.]

Another thing about the film is that in the next-to-final scene Indy and Marion don't seem sufficiently impressed by their adventure.  They recently witnessed dozens of people dying, some of whom they killed themselves, some of whom were completely eradicated by an awesome ancient holy power, and the last we see of them they're casually going to get a cocktail.  The appropriate response when Marion offers to buy Indiana a drink is, "A drink?  Are you crazy, woman?  We need to see a priest and a therapist, ASAP!"  Then again, maybe they worked through their emotional and psychological issues on the way back from the island.  It was a pretty long trip from the middle of the Aegean Sea to Washington, D.C. back in 1936.  (And how did they get back, anyway?)            

After Raiders, I watched a little Temple of Doom.  It's not nearly as good, but I wanted to watch it anyway, for old time's sake, and because I'd actually forgotten most of it.  There's some good actor trivia in Temple Of Doom.  For one thing, Dan Akroyd makes a completely random cameo, and then the Asian kid who plays Short Round is the same Asian kid who plays Data in The Goonies (How did I not know this before?).  Also, I immediately placed the actor playing the Chinese mob boss in the club as the guy who played Jean-Claude Van Damme's mentor in Bloodsport.  It was my second greatest actor connection of all-time.*


[Roy Chiao is the name of the actor playing the old guy in the scene.  He died in Seattle in 1999, apparently.]

I was too tired to stay up for all of Temple of Doom, so I just watched to the scene where the guy pulls the other guy's heart out with his bare hand.  It was one of the few scenes I remembered seeing as a kid.  Another is the scene in which they're served all the disgusting things.  I saw this one again, as well, and I thought to myself while watching it that you could never get away with doing it today.  For one thing, PETA would be up your ass, and then the scene is set in Indian, so you'd probably have some sort of Indian defamation league up your ass, as well.  Also, with an Indian restaurant on every other street corner in the U.S. now, the scene wouldn't make any sense.  People would be thinking, "What?  Eyeball soup?  Where's the mattar paneer and aloo gobi?"   


[I like how everybody gets their own individual monkey head.  You can't serve a delicacy like chilled monkey brains this family style.]

Alright, that's all I have today.  If you made it this far, you either skimmed to the end, you love Indiana Jones as much as I do, or it's a really, really slow day at work.

Until next time...

*My greatest connection ever is placing the guy who played the abusive dad in the movie Towelhead as the weird art teacher in Six Feet Under

**According to Wikipedia, some Indians, particularly Indian Hindus, were, in fact, unhappy with the way the movie portrayed their culture.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Entry 175: Bad Times

Wow, rough stretch, this.  Last week I melt our carrot peeler, and then this week this happens, and then this, and then this.  Craziness (well, at least two out of three, the other one was just an accident).

The FBI has released photos of two people of interest in the Boston Marathon bombings, so hopefully this goes somewhere.  So far my main take away from this has been just what a cluster-eff our media is.  I wish there was someway to impose a law that news outlets can only break news for two hours out of every day.  During the other the 22 hours, no new stories, no new developments, no changing the scroller at the bottom of the screen, no updating their website or blog or Facebook page or Twitter -- nothing new.  Instead, they actually have to take the time to investigate things properly, get the facts right, decide what to run, and present it in a measured fashion.  You know, actual journalism, not this succession of pseuo-information, Yahoo!, click-on-me, nothing-story garbage we have now.  I already know not to click on Yahoo! headlines under any circumstances*, but I didn't realize how bad other sites are as well.  CNN for instance is atrocious.  Weren't they once legit?  I guess you can toss them onto the turned-to-shite trash heap with ESPN and MTV.

[To honor Boston, I present the images of random players from my childhood from each of the city's four major sports teams.]


As for the actual bombings, it's terrible, obviously, but it's important to have a little bit of perspective.  We freak out when things like this happen, but they're super, super rare.  As I've mentioned before, it's really weird the things we're scared of.  It doesn't make much sense.  This piece hit the nail on the head for me.

As for the other stuff, the fertilizer plant explosion and the failed gun control vote: I don't have anything to say about the former, and I have too much to say about the latter.  Too much, because it's getting kinda late, and I don't have the energy to put it into words right now.  I'll just say that I liked the president's speech.  Also, the Senate should change the filibuster rules.  Yes, I would say this even if it was being used to block something I didn't support. 

Until next time...

*I have an account for fantasy baseball and an old email address that's become my "spam account", so I go there a few times a day.  I must admit, I'm drawn to the headlines.  But I've been burned too many times before, so now if I see something intriguing I'll look it up on a different site instead of clicking the link.  If I can't immediately find it on another site, it means it wasn't worth reading.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Entry 174: Week In Review

Had a lot going on this week.  For starters, I partially melted the head of our carrot peeler by putting it on the bottom rack of the dishwasher.  You can still use it, but it looks all weird and melty.  It's actually an awful peeler, so I kinda wish I had ruined it completely, so we'd be forced to buy a new one.  The other day I was peeling a yam for Lil' S (He didn't like it, by the way.  Oddly, he doesn't dig on the sweetish foods we've given him.  He much prefers the greens like broccoli and asparagus.  I guess that's a good thing.), and bits of peel kept getting stuck in the blade so that I'd have to pick it out after every other swipe.  I figured it's because the peeler is designed for carrots, not yams, but S said it does the same thing with carrots.  What the hell?  Is it too much to ask that a tool serve the one purpose it was built to serve?  It's not like a carrot peeler is an iPhone, where if the podcast app doesn't work very well*, it's somewhat excusable because the phone has a hundred other functions and probably not all of them are going to be fantastic.  All a peeler has to do is facilitate a relatively effortless peel for the user.  If you are a peeler maker, how do you not get that aspect of the peeler right?


One other product we have like this is a set of coasters that stick to the bottom of glasses.  The coasters are coated with a glossy sheen, and once your glass gets a ring of moisture on the bottom (you know, the ring the coaster is supposed to protect your table from) it bonds with the sheen.  So you lift up your glass and the coaster comes with it, and then it drops off and falls on the floor or your lap.  It's super annoying.  You can get around it by flipping the coasters upside down (the bottom is a feltlike material), but that's not the point.  The point is, WHO DESIGNS A COASTER ON WHICH YOU CANNOT PRACTICALLY SET A DRINK?  It's a coaster, not a Swiss Army knife.  It has one ridiculously simple purpose.  Get it right.



Anyway... In sporting news, I went to my first Nats game of the season on Thursday.  It was fun, but cold.  Weather.com screwed me.  It was predicting temperatures in the 70s all night, and the morning and afternoon were beautiful, so I was clad in shorts and a polo shirt.  It got windy and chilly in the evening, and as the game wore on I started getting pretty cold.  At one point I went to the stadium team shop to buy something with sleeves.  I fully expecting to be gouged, but I was in utter disbelief at the prices.  A thin hoodie was $120, and a long sleeve tee, the kind you'd buy at Target for $10, was $57.  That's not a gouging, that's a violation.  I didn't buy anything.  I decided I'd rather be cold than raped.

S always makes comments that we never do anything social now that we have a kid, but the evidence completely belies this.  We just don't go out together at night anymore.  Considering we have an infant kid, we're actually quite social (sometimes too social, if you ask me).  Today we went to brunch with this couple we just met who have a one-year old.  It was pretty cool.  The restaurant was great.  It was tapas style (i.e., lots of little dishes), which made me a bit uneasy at first, because with tapas I never know if the expectation is everybody eats the dishes they specifically ordered, or if it's suppose to be a free-for-all, and then if it's the latter, I never know how much I should take of each dish, and all that.  I didn't really want to go through this with a couple I had never met before.  But it all worked out pretty seamlessly; we just ate the dishes we ordered.  S being a vegetarian really helped, because she couldn't get in on the meat dishes, so there was no expectation to share.

[This picture is apropos of nothing.  It's just one I meant to post a few weeks ago when we had a random spring snow flurry, but forgot.]

This couple just moved to the U.S.  She's Dutch, he's Italian, and they met in Mozambique, so, of course, S knows them somehow.  They seem pretty cool.  They're on my "No Objection To Hanging Out Again List".  Their little boy is pretty adorable.

Our adorable little boy has been not so adorable of late when bed time rolls around.  He's doing a lot better with sleeping through the night, but now we're having trouble actually getting him to sleep.  He wants somebody to hold him the whole time, but he's taking longer and longer to get actually fall asleep now, so this is becoming less and less practical.  Plus, even if you do coddle him to sleep, unless he's in R.E.M., he'll wake up and start pitching a fit as soon as you set him down, anyway.  He's doing it with naps, too.  Even our nanny, who's some sort of baby sorceress, is having trouble with him.  It's not good, but what can you do?  My sister said she read somewhere that you can fill a glove with barley, sew it shut, and use it as a fake hand to keep a sleeping baby pacified.  This sounds like a great idea for a couple much more arts-and-crafts-y than S and I.  We'll have to get really desperate before we attempt any sewing.  Plus, I have a feeling that replacing my hand with the fake hand on our sleeping child would go something like this...



Until next time...

*And by the way, it doesn't, but that's a whole other entry I've been meaning to do -- just how shitty the podcast app on the iPhone is.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Entry 173: Sports, Books, and TV

The (March) Madness comes to an end.  Louisville wins the National Championship, and I win my work bracket competition.  I actually had it wrapped up prior to the finale, but I was still sorta rooting for Louisville because they were my highest ranked team, and because I thought they were better than Michigan.  It seems, for the most part, that if people have no real rooting interest in a game then they pull for the underdog, but I tend to do the opposite.  I like seeing excellence rewarded.  There's a romanticism of the gritty, gutty underdog among sports fans -- of the people who aren't innately talented, but who persevere through heart and hard work to defeat a more talented, but less determined opponent.  It's a nice story -- I mean, everybody loves Rocky and Rudy (well, maybe not Rudy) -- but I think it's mostly BS.  Often, the athletes and teams who have the most heart and work the hardest are actually the favorites... because they have heart and work hard.

[Louisville coach Rick Pitino is one of those guys like Robert Redford, where he looks young from a distance, and then during a close up you say to yourself, "Oh, that's right, he's actually an old man."]

Anyway, winning my office pool, gives me a bit of cheddar ($120, straight cash, homie), but more importantly it gives me some swagger and bragging rights at the lunch table.  This isn't a typical fill-out-a-bracket office pool.  It's more serious.  You don't pick the winners, you rank the teams 1 through 64.  Each time your n-th ranked team wins you get n points added to your total (Louisville was my highest-ranked team*, so each time they won, I got 64 more points).  The person with the most points at the end wins.  The scoring is all handled on a master Excel spreadsheet that also keeps track of something called "potential points" and "difficulty measure" -- like I said, it's serious stuff.  Each yearly winner gets a little trophy on display in the office.  So soon each time I retrieve a piece of paper from the printer, I'll be able to see my name engraved among the greats. 

In other sporting news, real sporting news, my past-grouppal** Barb Honchak is now the Invicta FC Flyweight Champion.  She's big time now, getting write-ups in SI.com, and whatnot.  I streamed her title fight, and it was really cool to see her win.   The fight itself was a bit on the boring side -- as sometimes happens in MMA, the fighters' styles "canceled each other out" so there wasn't a ton of action (Barb won by unanimous decision) -- but still, like I said, it was cool.  (By the way, the headlining fight on the card was crazy exciting: "The Karate Hottie" has got some moves.)


So... moving on to books, I started reading a newish Nick Hornby novel called Juliet, Naked.  It's pretty good so far, a typical Hornby page-turner.  It's nice to read an actual novel.  Other than my brother's book (highly recommended, by the way), I haven't read fiction in... well, I literally can't remember.  Reading fiction is one of the first things that gets cut from my activities list whenever things get busy for me, so now that I have a kid, I'm predicting a slow go for me with the fiction for the next 18-25 years.

One thing that doesn't get cut is TV.  This isn't because I'm some sort of uncouth philistine who prefers TV to reading; it's because, unlike reading, TV is something S and I can do together.  TV Time = Quality Couple Time.***  Right now we're between shows, though.  We're caught up on Girls, and I didn't like the second season much at all, anyway.  It went from being a halfway entertaining show to being a cheap knockoff of a Todd Solodnz work or something.  Everything and everybody got weird and dark and the best character in the series by far (the tall dude with the big ears) was just a bit part until the last few episodes.  I might be out on the show for good.  If S really wants me to watch it with again her I will, but I'm certainly not pushing for it.

We threw in the towel on Game of Thrones, and I never got started on Mad Men, so what else is there?  House of Cards?  Maybe we'll try that one.  It's gotta be better than Say Yes to the Dress, at least.    

Until next time...  
         

*I actually don't follow college basketball hardly at all, so I leaned heavily on Nate Silver's projections.  If you listen to smart people, that kinda makes you smart too.

**For an explanation of this term, click here. 

***I completely justify this by something Dr. Drew once said -- something to the effect of, "Intimacy is shared experience".  So even if you aren't actively interacting with somebody (perhaps you're watching TV) you can still be building intimacy.  At least that's what I tell myself and S.

 

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Entry 172: On Friends

I realized the other day that the word "friend" isn't a tremendously useful word.  It's too broad, too all encompassing.  Look at your Facebook friends and count what percentage of them are actually your friend.  I bet this percentage changes drastically from person to person, not necessarily because people have radically different types of friendships, but because what somebody considers a friend is so subjective.  When I say "my friend" all you really know about my relationship with this person is that I know them.  A lot of times that's sufficient, but sometimes I'd like more accuracy, and what I find -- as I get older and more people come in and out of my life -- is that I often struggle to come up with the correct term to describe my relationship with somebody.  Friend might be too strong*, but acquaintance, the only other viable option, too weak.  I end up getting super specific -- "The girlfriend of a friend of this guy who I once worked with and sometimes saw out at the bar and would hang out with when in fact I did see him, but never called up to hang out or anything like that..." -- which kinda kills the flow of a story.

 
To try to remedy this, I developed a friend taxonomy.  Here it is.

Homies -- Also called BFFs or super friends.  Your tightest of tight.  People you'd put in your wedding party.  Your lifelong friends.  If you have three homies, consider yourself fortunate.

Subhomies -- People who wouldn't be in your wedding, but would be invited for sure.  People you'd have no problem calling for anything at anytime.  The main difference between homie and subhomie is usually just length of time you've known them.  And by the way, next time I see one of my subhomie's, I'm going to greet them with, "'sup subhomie?".

Pals -- Also called buddies (mates in The British Commonwealth countries).  These are people you like, but you're not super close with, for whatever reason.  If they moved or you moved there's a decent chance you'd lose contact all together (other than keeping tabs on Facebook).  It wouldn't be weird if you invited them to your wedding, but it wouldn't be offensive if you didn't.  This term encompasses most of the people we now generically call friends.

Grouppals -- Also called crewmates.  People you like, maybe even really like, but only ever hang out with as part of a larger group, for whatever reason.  You can replace group- with work-, team-, room- or any other specifier.  These friendships are context specific, but they're legitimate.  They're more than just people you know and are on good terms with.


Fosos -- Friend Of Significant Other.  Pretty self-explanatory, but sometimes the line between fosos and other categories can get a little blurry.  The defining question is, if you broke up with your significant other, would the person in question be forced to take your significant other's side and essentially unfriend you?  If the answer is yes, then that person is a foso, otherwise he/she belongs in a different category. 

Childhooders -- People you're friends with today, because you were friends as children.

Facebookers -- People you only are friends with on Facebook (or some other social network).

Lovebuds -- Also (less euphemistically) called f--- buddies.  Somebody you're only friends because you're f------ them.

Theres -- People who you hang out with just because they're there (there can be a neighborhood, a school, a workplace, etc.).  The difference between pals and theres is that you actively enjoying hanging out with pals, with theres you just do it -- usually out of boredom or loneliness -- even though you don't really enjoy it all that much.  Note, you don't have anything against theres and generally wish them well, but they wouldn't be a part of your life if circumstance didn't put you side by side.

Schneids -- People you actively dislike (unlike theres), but somehow end up hanging out with often.  Usually schneids are friends of friends.  I chose this name because schneid has a prejorative connotation in sports ("get off the schneid"), and because I once knew a guy named Schneider** who fit this role perfectly for me.  He was a homie's pal, so I'd often end up interacting with him as if he was my pal, even though I didn't like the guy, at all.

Frenemies -- The difference between a frenemy and a schneid is that frenemies are love/hate, schneids are just hate (or dislike, rather, hate is too strong a word).  I've never had a frenemy and probably never will.  They're more for tweener girls than nearly middle-aged men, I suspect.


So that's the basic friendship taxonomy, but there's still a bit more.  There are some friendship qualifiers.

FO -- Used as a prefix to denote "friend of", e.g., I met Mike through my homie Chris, so he's my fo-homie.  If I get to know him well enough, he might become my subhomie.  

SO -- Used as a suffix to denote "signficant other", e.g., Belinda is my pal Stan's girlfriend, so she's my pal-so.

Ex -- Used as a prefix to denote somebody you are expressly no longer friends with, e.g., After Mike drunkenly groped my girlfriend, he became my ex-pal.

Past -- Used as a prefix to denote somebody you're no longer close with, but not because of any ill-will, e.g., After college, my old roommate moved to Lesotho, and we haven't really kept in touch, so he's my past-subhomie.

Inactive -- Used as a prefix like past- only it denotes a strong possibility of the friendship picking up again, e.g., After college, my old roommate moved to Lesotho, and we only keep in touch every few years, but when we do it's like we were never apart, so right now he's my inactive-subhomie. 

Potential -- Used as prefix to denote a friendship that isn't there yet, but might be in the future, e.g., I get along well with my coworker Mike, so he's my potential-workpal. 


OK, that's it.  You can succinctly describe any friendship you have now.  I'll never again be looking for the right way to describe my relationship with somebody.  The "girlfriend of a friend of this guy who I once worked with and sometimes saw out at the bar and would hang out with when in fact I did see him, but never called up to hang out or anything like that" now becomes a fo-past-workpal-so -- it's that simple.  

By the way, I really want this to take off, so if you all could start using it in your everyday vocabulary, that would be great.  Thanks.

Until next time...

*You could go the route of one of my past-subhomies who would call anybody ever he said "hi" to a friend.  I don't like this because it comes off as you trying to sound cooler than you actually are, which, by the way, is exactly why my friend did it.

**His name isn't actually Schneider, but it's close to that, and once I heard somebody erroneously call him Schneider, and he got annoyed, which I thought was funny, so it's even more perfect than if his name was actually Schneider.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Entry 171: Easter and Stuff

My folks are in town, so I'll try to make this brief.  They're occupied right now watching some British such-and-such on PBS, so I have a few minutes to try to crank something out.  The only problem is that I'm not great at making things brief.  I can make things short, word count-wise, but somehow all my entries seem to take the same amount of (longish) time.  A shorter entry probably means I typed the same number of words as usual, just fewer made the final cut.*  I've tried before to make a concerted effort to write faster, but I can't really do it.  I'm a slow reader and writer -- that's just how I roll.


It's been great seeing my parents so far.  They do really well with Lil' S and vice-versa.  They watched him the entire day the past two days while S and I were at work, and everybody is still alive, so -- success!  He's a little stuffed up again, but it's not as bad as last time.  He seems to be past the worst of it.  He's not sleeping through the night on anything approaching a consistent basis, but that's in sickness and in health, unfortunately.  Here's my schedule the past few nights:

Baby monitoring duty, 8 p.m. - 1 a.m.
Sleep in my bed (alone), 1 a.m. - 4 a.m.
Sleep in the basement, 4:15 a.m. - 6:30 a.m. (swap with S who goes to our bed)
"Sleep" with the little guy in our bed, 6:35 a.m. - 7:45 a.m.
Wake up, 7:45 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. (depending on how many times I hit snooze)

It's more a game of musical beds than it is a night's sleep.  But I'm getting used to it, and it will end someday... I hope.

We went to a kite festival this Saturday on the National Mall.  It was pretty fun.  The weather was nice, so we were able to walk around a bit, and then we sat down on a blanket and ate lunch with some other couples we kinda know who also have zero-year old kids.  It's funny, having a child is a bit like being a child when it comes to hanging out with people.  Remember when you were a kid, and you'd be around another kid and all that would need to be established was that you both had a red bike, and then it was like, "Cool!  Let's go play!"?  Now, it's like, "Hey, you have an infant, too.  Cool, let's talk about strollers and bodily functions!"   


After the festival we went into Potbelly Sandwich Works to get one of their famous old-fashioned milk shakes.  I was going to get Oreo**.  I was anticipating it the entire fifteen-minute walk to the shop.  I so had my heart set on it.  I hadn't been that eagerly anticipating a milk shake since... well, ever.    Of course, they were out of milk.  Heartbreak.  I tried to fill the void with a Dove bar from CVS, but it just wasn't the same.

Sunday was Easter, which I'd completely forgotten about.  My family used to celebrate Easter as a kid -- baskets of candy, ham for dinner, and all that -- but now my Easter plans are strictly incidental.  We never actually plan anything "for Easter", but it's a day things are going on, so often we end up doing something.  This year we went up to Baltimore to visit my cousin B, his wife A, and their four-month old Lil' M (babymania).  It's sort of embarrassing that I've had a first-cousin living 30 miles from me for the past year and a half and Sunday was the first time we've gone up there to see them, but so it goes -- it's been a pretty busy year and a half.

B and A are both architects, and they bought, gutted, and rebuilt a row house in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore.  The house is really cool and so is the neighborhood.  We had some dinner and wine, chatted, and watched a little college basketball.  The only bad thing is that I saw the now infamous Kevin Ware injury and wished I hadn't.  Turns out seeing a college kid's shin and foot dangle from this knee like a limp unfurled flag is not the greatest way to put a cap on the evening.  Still, pretty good night, overall.

Until next time...

*And here's where you make the joke, "Wow, if this is what you keep, how bad is the stuff you cut!"  Haha.

**I don't much care for the Oreo as a cookie, but put it in ice cream, and now you've got something.  By the way, have you ever heard of the Oreo-like cookie, Hydrox?  It actually predates the Oreo, and yet the Oreo is much more prevalent now.  Probably because of the name.  Hydrox sounds more like a cleanser or a drug for erectile dysfunction that it does a cookie.